Some OEMs, however, still aren't seeing big demand for Microsoft's new touch-centric operating system

Back in November, Microsoft announced that it had sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses, outpacing the sales performance of its predecessor, Windows 7. Today, just over a month later, Microsoft announced that it has sold 60 million Windows 8 licenses (upgrades and licenses sold to OEMs), once again outpacing Windows 7. It took Windows 7 a little over three months to cross the 60 million licenses sold threshold.

While the large number of licenses sold is definitely good news, a recent report suggests that actual usage figures for Windows 8 are below that of Windows 7 at the same point in its release cycle and is actually tracking below that of the much-maligned Windows Vista operating system. Simply put, 60 million licenses sold doesn't mean that there are actually 60 million Windows 8 devices out there in the hands of consumers and business.

“There was not a huge spark in the market," said Emmanuel Fromont, head of Acer's American division. “It’s a slow start, there’s no question.” ASUS CFO David Chang stated, "Demand for Windows 8 is not that good right now." And Fujitsu's President added that Windows 8 demand was "weak".

On the app front, Microsoft announced that customers have downloaded over 100 million apps from the Windows Store.

A rough road ahead is putting it politely. More like a road closure. There's a Microsoft store at the shopping mall near me. Even on the weekend before Christmas, it was empty. The 5 or 6 employees milling around with nothing to do. No customers in sight. The Apple store was packed of course, wall to wall people, as were most other stores in the mall.

There's a well deserved mental association in most folks minds, between the Microsoft name, and that slow crashy virusy PC on their desk at work. You know, the one that never seems to work right, and requires an entire IT department of geeks to keep it running. They don't want that experience on their phone or in their home. Add a clunky unintuitive UI, and sub-par hardware, and it's a perfect storm of marketplace failure.

Like the Kin before it, this current crop of Microsoft phones will end up in the failed product rubbish bin of yesteryear, and these Microsoft retail stores will too, right alongside those Gateway Country retail stores. Remember those? No? Neither do most folks.

"There's a well deserved mental association in most folks minds, between the Microsoft name, and that slow crashy virusy PC on their desk at work. You know, the one that never seems to work right, and requires an entire IT department of geeks to keep it running."

I wouldn't call it well deserved. The reason MS has those issues, is because MS is the only company that took on the whole package. The entire world runs off MS computers, and servers including every manufacturing facility that makes every iPhone, Blackberry, Android and toilet seat covers for that matter. They support 10's of thousands of peripherals from hundreds and hundreds of different vendors, as well as the entire enterprise sector. No one else can do that, no one else is even close. No one else has even tried.

You're confused if you think the "whole world" runs on Microsoft. Who told you that? The only place where Microsoft is the defacto standard is corporate business IT. You know, the generic corporate desktop for business email, spreadsheets, documents, etc.

No manufacturing facility anywhere runs Microsoft. None of them. They all run mainframes, and embedded devices (usually with a Linux kernel). Most 24/7 databases run on some flavor of unix, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, or Linux for example.

All 15 stock exchanges in the world run NSK on Tandem NonStop. 100% of all nuclear power generation in the US, and 80% of *all* power generation in the US also runs on NSK. Traffic lights for every intersection in the country runs on QNX, VXworks, or Abassi. The most secure military installations use OpenBSD and other BSD variants.

And lets not forget Mainframe. OS/360, AS/400, MPE, and other mainframes are a multi $Billion dollar market segment.

Heck, even the ancient OS/2 Warp operating system is still in active use, running thousands of ATM bank machines across the country, and also in retail POS systems.

The fact is, aside from the mundane corporate desktop, almost nothing runs on Microsoft.

"No manufacturing facility anywhere runs Microsoft. None of them. They all run mainframes, and embedded devices (usually with a Linux kernel). Most 24/7 databases run on some flavor of unix, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, or Linux for example."

Yes they do, all of them. I come from a supply chain background, beleive me, I know. It's not that there arent databases and some servers on those OS's, but how are hte users connecting to it? Using MS computers. And yes, the business standard is MS Exchange running on MS servers. More work is done via email than any other medium. The other thing is apps. In all of those manufacturing plants, every step of the process is done on MS software. From planning, to procurement to imbound logistics, to inventory to shop floor, to QA to packaging to logistics to reverse logistics to accounting. All running on Windows. The above is true for most companies on Earth including the Foxconn facilities that Make Apple products.

If i remember right tse n nyse are using windows server not *nix ,I remember a news story on the switch from daily tech/anandtech like a decade ago,Air traffic control runs on windows in the usa,If you remember the computer crash story on daily tech few years ago in la airport.So nothing runs old windows/ms products in the big side of biz is kinda a lie.

Yup... When I say the whole world runs of Microsoft I'm not speaking literally of course. What that means is that the majority of business does run off of Microsoft in 1 form or another every company uses them. They are by far the dominant force in the enterprise market as well as the PC market. No 1 has ever done what they do. Of course there are other parties Linux, Unix, Sun, Oracle and mainframes too, and a lot of companies use them but it's only part of the picture. Microsoft is the only 1 that does the whole package, and they are firmly entrenched in that.

Let me put it another way... If hypothetically, a single company were to close its doors and disable all of their products like Apple, Oracle, Google, Sun micro, UNIX, any Linux based house, SAP, or any the number of other companies. If one of them we're too close their doors and suddenly deactivated all products, life will go on on... Some customer/companies would stumble and have to figure out another solution, and some would lose money for it. Some might even go out of business... But if MS were to close up and all products deactivated, the entire world's economy would come to a grinding halt. It would literally be the end of the world as we know it. No other company can say that